Yaghnobi people, or Yagnobian people, (Yaghnobi:yaγnōbī́t/Tajik: яғнобиҳо,/Persian: یغنابیها) is the name of an isolated people who live in the Sughd province of Tajikistan in the valleys of the Yagnob, Kul and Varzob rivers. These are the last living relics of the great Sogdian nation that once inhabited most of Central Asia beyond the Oxus/Amu Darya River. The Soghdian language gradually gave way to Persian after the 5th century AD, with the latter largely supplanting the former by the 10th century AD. It is nothing short of a miracle that the Sogdian language and people have survived to the present in the small numbers of the Yaghnobi people and their language.
The 1926 and 1939 census data gives the number of Yaghnabi speakers as approximately 1,800. In 1955, M. Bogolyubov estimated the number of Yaghnabi native speakers as more than 2,000. In 1972, A. Khromov estimated 1,509 native speakers in the Yaghnob valley and about 900 elsewhere. The estimated number of Yagnobi people is approximately 25,000.[1]
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Their traditional occupations were agriculture, growing produce such as barley, wheat, and legumes as well as breeding cattle, oxen and asses. There were traditional handicrafts including weaving which was mostly done by the men. The women worked on molding the earthenware crockery.[2]
The Yagnobian people originated from the Sogdians, a people dominant in the area until the Arab conquests in the 8th century when Sogdiana was defeated. In that period Yagnobians settled in the high valleys. The Yaghnobi people are Sunni Muslims, and some elements of pre-Islamic religion (probably, Zoroastrianism) are still preserved.[3]
Until the 20th century Yagnobians lived through their natural economy and some still do, as the area they originally inhabited is still remote from roads and electrical lines. The first negative contact with the outer world occurred with Communism in the 1930s during the Great Purge, when some Yagnobians were exiled, but the most traumatic events were the Communist 1957 and 1970 forced resettlings by the Soviet Union, from the Yagnob mountains to the semi-desert lowlands of Tajikistan.[4][5]
Red Army Helicopters were sent to valleys, ostensibly as there was an avalanche threat, to evacuate the population. Some Yagnobians died of shock in helicopters as they were moved to the plains. They were then forced into hard-labor by Communist officials to work on the cotton plantations on the plains. Some Yagnobians rebelled, with a few groups escaping back to the mountains, but Communists destroyed all kishlaks (villages) in the valleys to prevent any attempts to return. As a means to finally genocide the group, Communists tried to annihilate the ancient Yagnobian culture, by destroying Yagnob religious books, the oldest of which was 600 years old.[6] Pskon, the biggest village on the Yaghnob River, was erased from the maps, and Yagnobian ethnicity was officially abolished by the Soviet State. Through the change in climate and back-breaking work, several hundred Yagnobians died.[7]
Since 1983, families have begun to return to the Yagnob Valley. The majority of those that remain on the plains tend to be assimilated with the Tajiks, as their children study in school in the Tajik language. The returnees keep the Yagnobi culture and language alive, as their children do not speak either Tajik or Russian. The returnees live through the natural economy, and the majority remain without roads and electricity.
